Improving Your Event Marketing Emails

The organizers participating in the survey were responsible for all kinds of events, including concerts, festivals, sports events, workshops, and professional conferences.

The survey found that professional conferences have the lowest email open rate among event organizers.

That doesn't surprise us. Marketing a conference is hard, hard, hard.

To improve open rates, Eventbrite suggested organizers should:

Use a recognized Sender name. Stay out of trash cans by using an easily recognized and trusted source. Test use of your organization's name, your event's name and the names of executives to see the effect on open rates. Don't vary the sender name, after the test.

Use short Subject lines. The best subject lines are no more than 50 characters long.

Use specific Subject lines. Let the recipient know what to expect when she clicks.

Leverage urgency. Subject lines that create a sense of urgency ("Heads up: seats almost sold out") boost open rates by 22%.

Personalize. Personalizing a Subject line with the recipient’s name can increase open rates by 20%.

Test, then be consistent. Find out through A/B tests which copy resonates with your audience (i.e., prompts the most opens and clicks), then use what you've learned in future emails.